Making Waves in the Pool

Gold's gym is not ideal to train in. The laps are short, the pool is small, and during water aerobics their is only one lane. Worse then only having one lane is the part that the 10 water aerobic participants were jumping up and down making waves. At first I thought Oh this feels like swimming in a lake, but after awhile I started to think - I hope I don't get motion sick. (Which I was starting to feel!) I also started to think about High school. At region I was ahead of my time flowing swiftly through the water. (100 fly was my best stroke) I flew through 75 yards incredibly, (When I say incredible, I still was well below the pace of the top High school athletes, so I'm not saying I was incredible...) then turned the corner for the last 25 and ran out of gas. The question I have is how hard do you go so you don't run out of gas? Should I be swimming with only my arms to keep my leg strength? What if that makes me feel too worn out? What if I lay back and then realize I could've done more on the swim. I think that is one benefit to people that have the run as their strength, it is last. If the swim was last I would know what I had left in me. I would know how hard I had to go to catch up. They don't do it last because people would drown. They'd be too tired to swim. Where as running you CAN quit. I also thought about the swim. One word of advice is not to swim the backstroke. Swim either freestyle or breaststroke. You can keep your focus on the finishing point and not waste time getting off track. Last year I made sure to keep my eye on the bouy and then I focused on someone swimming in front of me so I could swim as straight as possible and not waste my energy swimming further out than I needed too. I guess the biggest thing is that I'll learn from this year and then hopefully improve every year after that. I did learn one thing from my mini tri is that I need a road bike! It's no longer a WANT but a NEED!